Counterpoint: The rules are rigged against US workers

By HEIDI SHIERHOLZ

Sunday

Sep 2, 2018 at 2:00 AM

The labor market does not deliver for many Americans.

The U.S. workforce comprises 156 million workers ― men and women, young and old, of every race and ethnicity. This workforce is the source of our economy’s strength; it is America’s workers who work hard to generate the goods and services that move our country forward.

But even though these workers devote a huge part of their waking hours to the labor market, the labor market simply does not deliver for many of them.

For most of the past four decades, the United States has suffered from rising inequality and anemic wage growth for most workers. While these trends have a number of causes, the most common thread that binds them is the degradation of bargaining power of low- and moderate-wage workers.

This situation of weak economic leverage for most workers is the product of decades of attacks on workers’ leverage by policymakers, either through direct action or through a failure to keep pace with evolving employer practices that wrest leverage from workers. The result is that the rules governing work in this country are rigged against working people from their first day on the job, leaving low- and moderate-wage workers with little bargaining power to demand their fair share of the growing economic pie.

The best guarantee for a fair workplace for workers is union representation and a collective bargaining agreement. And strong unions improve the wages and working conditions of all working people ― both workers in unions and workers who aren’t in unions ― since unions help raise standards.

However, as of 2017, only 10.7 percent of wage and salary workers were union members. This disconnect is the result of decades of fierce opposition to unions, with employers exploiting loopholes in outdated labor law to defeat workers’ organizing efforts while corporate lobbyists block attempts at reform.

Policymakers should stand up for U.S. workers and act now to put policies in place to help close the gap. For example, policies should be enacted to ensure that workers who want to form a union are able to do so free from employer intimidation and retaliation.

Policies should also be enacted to help ensure that when workers join a union they are able to reach a contract successfully by creating mandatory mediation and arbitration processes. The law should also prohibit companies from permanently replacing striking workers, and these protections should also be extended to include workers engaged in “secondary strikes” or other protest actions in solidarity with striking workers.

In addition, policymakers should ban states from passing so-called “right to work” laws, which are intended to undermine the finances of private-sector unions by preventing them from being able to require that non-union bargaining-unit members — people that unions are required by law to represent — pay their fair share of the cost of that representation. Workers who want a union must be able to effectively finance the organization to ensure that they have a meaningful voice in the workplace.

We know how significant a force for a fair economy unions are by looking at how much their decline since the 1970s has contributed to inequality between middle- and high-wage workers: Union decline can explain one-third of the rise in wage inequality among men and one-fifth of the rise in wage inequality among women from 1973 to 2007.

The policies described here are the types of reforms needed to help unrig the system and ensure fairness on the job for working people.

Heidi Shierholz is policy director for the Economic Policy Institute. This op-ed was distributed by InsideSources.com.

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